10 Top Ways To Promote Your Music That Actually Work in 2017!

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So I’ve already written a free complete ebook introducing people to music marketing, and even created one of the (if not THE) best courses around on promoting your music. That said, today I wanted to go a step further and bring you in on some hard hitting strategies that will gain you more fans, and that actually work in this day and age.

There are too many dated articles out there which talk about promoting your music. Many of them simply share old information which didn’t work that well at it’s peak. Many of them give smaller results than they’re worth.

Today though, I’m going to cover 6 things you can do to better promote your music. Marketing your music is essential if you want to get your name out there and actually start making money from your talent, so if these are some of your aims, be sure to read and implement as much of this guide as humanly possible. In other words, all of it. 😉

And if you find it useful, please share it with friends or talk about it on your website. So, let’s get into the promotion tips.

1. Market Yourself As A Business To Business Musician

Ok, so here’s a huge tip I can give you:

Instead of focusing all of your efforts on reaching out to all your fans individually, focus a lot more of your efforts on building up good relationships with other businesses!

So I know some of you will be wondering what I mean by this. What I mean is that you should spend a good portion of your time contacting event organizers, radio stations, websites that cover your genre of music in some way, TV channels, DJs, musicians who are more established than you, and the like.

What do all of the above have in common? They have a much bigger audience than you, and within their audiences are people who will fit into your ideal fan base!

While a lot of musicians spend lots of time grinding it out trying to make new fans one by one, more successful and full time musicians often spend more time building up relationships with people who can get their music out there better than they can. The thing is, if you get in good with bigger companies and they recommend you to their audience, you’ll get a lot more exposure from that one article / event / show / interview than you would from spending a month on Facebook and Twitter trying to get new fans from scratch. That’s why it’s worth investing time and effort into forming these kinds of relationships.

Now I’m not saying don’t market to fans individually. You should, but usually only once they’re already on your social sites and mailing list. In terms of actually getting people to hear you the first time around, getting other established businesses to promote you is one of the best ways to go about doing this. So switch your target audience and start focusing more of your efforts on other businesses. And remember, as a musician, you are a business!

2. Focus A Good Portion Of Your Time On Gigging

Gigging is one of those golden activities every musician should be doing! Not only can it be great for raising awareness of your brand, but it can also be monetized in multiple ways, and help you build a strong relationship with your core audience.

Now playing gigs isn’t anything new or ‘out there’. That said, it’s something that works, and works well.

In terms of promotion, some of the best gigs you can do are events which have other acts in your genre also playing at the event. This will mean the audience will contain one or two types of people who you’ll want to target:

Fans of other musicians in your genre, or

Fans of your genre in general.

For gaining NEW fans, this is the kind of audience you want! While for increased revenue you’d want to put on your own gigs and make it all about you, you won’t get very many people first discovering your music at these kind of gigs. Because of this, they won’t do much in terms of increasing your fanbase. When playing at shows with multiple artists however, you have a good chance to get your music in front of new targeted music fans.

Gigging is great for both gaining new fans and making money from the music industry, so be sure to get your gigging game on!

3. Post Content Regularly On Your Own Professional Website

With so many new acts coming out every day, it can be hard to stay top-of-mind. Yes, someone might hear one of your songs and like what you’re doing, but if you don’t keep giving them more content and keep them entertained in some form of another, there’s a good chance that they may forget you.

It’s because of this that you’ll want to take advantage of your website, and employ a good ‘content marketing‘ strategy.

“any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers”

In other words, you want to use your content to get in new fans and to keep existing fans happy.

But what kind of content can you publish? Here are some types of content you should be creating:

Songs. This is the obvious one.

Videos. Another obvious one.

Blog posts to do with your music career. So what you’re working on, where you’ll be performing, asking fans for their opinions on things, etc.

Blog posts related to your genre of music. You can get a lot of people finding out about you by publishing content related to your genre as a whole rather than just you as a musician. More on this later.

As I mentioned, the majority of content should initially be going on your own website. This will help build your website up into a valuable asset, and one that will go a long way to getting new fans as well as keeping existing ones happy. If you haven’t yet made a site, you can see how to make one here.

4. Be More Than A Musician

This is a big one, so listen up. If you want to get as much exposure for your music as possible, you’ll really want to make yourself more than just a musician! What do I mean by this? Well, you want to do everything you can to get yourself out there and in front of a targeted audience. And by everything, I mean things that aren’t directly related to promoting yourself as a musician (but that will still get new targeted eyes to you and your music).

The good news for you is, not many musicians are doing this. This means there are a lot of opportunities out there if you use this tactic correctly.

Some ways you can do this include:

Talking About More Than Just Your Music On Your Site

Remember the above point about posting more content on your site? Well who’s to say that you have to talk about you all the time? By talking about other acts and your genre of music in general, not only do you have more content to share with your audience, but you’ll have more things which you can rank for in search engines. This will mean more traffic to your site in the long-run, as you’ll be using relevant terms which people will be searching for to find your kind of music. This strategy is definitely worth using, so get started with it asap!

Creating A Platform Related To Your Genre Of Music

This is something I’ve talked about and helped people do in the Full Time Musician course. So taking the above theory even further, why not create a website or podcast which you target at people who like your kind of music? This can be a music review podcast, a radio show which showcases your genre, or even a website which generally covers everything in your music scene. Furthermore, it could even be something not 100% related to your genre that a lot of people in your genre also like. So if you make music skateboarders often listen to, you may want to make a skateboarding site and play your music on the site and in the videos. You’ll also want to include a shop page where people can buy your music, and possibly even start selling skateboarder related merchandise with your logo on it.

Doing these kinds of things will get you in front of people you wouldn’t have otherwise, and allow you to showcase your music to new people who are largely interested in your genre.

5. Use A Mailing List

As my regular readers will know, I’ve been banging on about this for as long as this site has been around. Having a newsletter which people can join is one of the best ways to not only communicate with fans, but to also build up relationships with them and turn those relationships into profitable ones.

Once people visit your website, the last thing you want them to do is leave and never return again. This is where mailing lists come in!

If you can get people to sign up to your list before they leave, you’ll have their email address. From here you can communicate with them on a weekly basis, and remind them about you and your music. The following strategy on swapping their email address for a freebie works very well.

If you haven’t set your own newsletter up yet, you can see how to do so here.

6. Never Make Any Weak Moves!

Ok, so this one is more of a tip of how not to promote your music. That said, focusing on not losing fans is just as important as gaining new fans (I should have made that point 7 ;)).

If you can make good songs but also make the occasional dud, it’s important to know what to do with that dud song. Even if you’re spent money to record it, don’t use it. Don’t give it out to fans. Instead, put it in a deep folder in your computer that will never be found by anyone! This song will do you more harm than good, and work at chipping away at your reputation.

Similarly, when you’re starting to do well, it’s easy to want to scale up quick, or rinse and repeat what’s been working for you. This is a good idea, but only if you don’t let the quality of what you’re doing slide.

In general, you want to avoid doing anything that will have a negative impact on your reputation. You want people to think of you as one of the best musicians in your genre, and you want to give people who haven’t heard you before the best first impression. If you’re putting out weak songs though or weak artwork, a percentage of people will first hear you through that weak song, and possibly never give you another chance.

So keep everything you’re doing to a consistently high level, and people will regard you as a higher quality of musician.

Comments

HI Shaun, I like your comment about connecting with people that have a bigger audience than me. And to write about others via a blog is also a very good idea for the seach engine links..I very much appreciate your insights and what you share. The music business has endless turns and twists and you’ve inspired me to get out there and write more and contact more people eventhough I do that a lot, thanks Shaun, ps. my 9th new age solo piano cd is coming out in Febuary 2014, it’s been recorded and we are getting ready for the editing stage. Peace, Mark.

Hi Mark, glad the article connected with you. Promoting your music isn’t always a fast race to the top, there are steps which need to be taken, and it’s a gradual building process. That said, connecting with those who have a bigger audience can be a short cut many don’t take advantage of.

I hope you’re release went well and you took advantage of some of these promotion strategies.

Awesome article! I agree 100%! In the end every musician “must” act entrepreneurial and market his music constantly. I like your idea of being a B2B musician. I also think that building relationships to “multipliers” is key in growing a band faster. But how to attract them? And how can musicians add some value on their event? You have some ideas? Shares won´t be interesting for them I guess. Maybe some Press-Collaboration or Website / Cross Promotion maybe?

I´d be glad if you´ll find the time to reply and look forward to your ideas on that.

Hi Jonathan. You’re right, shares won’t be interesting to them. You can however benefit them if your name has a buzz and you can share some of that buzz with their event. While you won’t be able to get in this position initially, using the compounding effect you should be able to get to that stage and get some attention around yourself. From there you’ll make it more and more desirable for others to work with you, meaning they’ll get benefit and some of the attention you’re getting.

It’s all about building your way up the ladder, making yourself more valuable at each stage.

After reading your first tip that suggests connecting with businesses I thought I would take your advice. Before I do, I thought you should know that i’m seriously going to apply as much as I can from this article to real life. It was informative, easy to understand, and it has seriously helped me a bunch as i’m just starting to promote my music. Anyways, I was wondering if you have any specific strategies for tips getting articles/blogs to post links/reviews/mentions of my music on their sites? Here is my music sound cloud.com/ridleyjack … I would greatly appreciate some of your advice and good work with the article. Thanks!

Nice tips Shaun. Anyway I must be the most unlucky guy from the world cause I’ve been doing this everyday of this year and I spent lots of money with gear and I didn’t earn even a cent. My friends say that my records are amazing and that I just play the guitar like Eric Clapton but nobody wants to give me a pound. I think the music is just for those who have big marketing companies supporting them. I’m completly tired of this and I’m almost sure I’ll be delivering pizza forever.

Agree with this article completely. Musicians need to start looking at themselves as a business and respect the kind of work that goes into making a business successful. Look at Mcdonalds for example. Arguably one of the best known brands in the world, yet they still constantly advertise on TV, radio, magazines, etc. This should give you an idea of how much work you, as an unknown musician, have to put into marketing. Not just any work of course though, smart and consisitent work. It’s a marathon not a sprint.